Insidiously Sown Lies About The Holocaust Grow In Fertile Soil Of Ignorance

COMMENTARY

April 28, 1993|By DEBBIE M. PRICE, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

From California it came, a voice of pure evil, whispering gently, persuasively into the phone.

``The primary charge against the Germans is that they used homicidal gas chambers to exterminate millions of human beings,`` the voice said. ``It cannot be shown that a single gas chamber for killing human beings existed in any of the camps.``

The voice went on, patiently, relentlessly: The people who say the gas chambers existed refuse to debate us. We only want to debate. That is the issue.

What is there to debate?

The Holocaust happened. Six million Jews died. Men, women and children were herded into concentration camps and exterminated. Allied troops found hundreds of thousands of starving people and corpses at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald.

There are films and still photographs and mountains of meticulous documentation of the genocide kept by the Germans themselves.

The Holocaust is a fact as incontrovertible as the shining of the sun.

Yet, on the very day President Clinton dedicated the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, here was Bradley Smith, progenitor of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, saying, with perfect assurance: ``It was a lie concocted under the auspices of the Soviets during World War II and one that mainline Jewish organizations picked up and ran with.``

What about the Holocaust memorial? The trials at Nuremberg?

``You are a little girl,`` Smith said, ``and it is not worth talking to you.``

With that he hung up and I felt sick.

Incredibly, Bradley Smith has an audience.

The man and others like him, who call themselves Holocaust revisionists, are busily planting bad seeds in the vacant minds of college students. The worst part is that these kids, two generations removed from World War II and pitifully undereducated, do not know how preposterous and hateful his lies are.

This spring, Smith`s Committee for Open Debate succeeded in publishing an advertisement in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of the University of Texas in Austin. The Anti-Defamation League of B`nai B`rith reports that five other colleges had published the advertisement as of February 1992, while 12 schools had rejected it and two had published it with editorial comment.

The UT students and one faculty member who voted to publish the committee`s ad in the Daily Texan got tangled up in specious First Amendment arguments -- newspapers reject ads all the time -- and failed to recognize that the newspaper was publishing claims that were false.

Mark Briskman, director of the local ADL, talked to UT juniors and seniors and found that many of them knew nothing or very little about the Holocaust.

It`s worse than that.

A poll released on the eve of the memorial dedication found that to one out of five adults and high school students surveyed ``it seems possible that the Holocaust never happened.`` Another 12 percent said they just didn`t know.

Sixty-five percent of the adults and 72 percent of the students didn`t know that 6 million Jews died. Half the high school students didn`t know that Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka were concentration camps.

But this lack of knowledge about the Holocaust is worse than a breakdown in education.

It is a failure of this country`s collective memory and a product of our blindness to atrocities committed beyond our borders.

What do the 20 percent think is happening today with the ``ethnic cleansing`` in what used to be Yugoslavia? Have Americans forgotten about Cambodia and Guatemala, too, or did they ever even know?

When people are ignorant, it is easier to believe lies.

When good people look the other way, it is easy for the Hitlers of the world to work their madness.